“Music and poetic stylings are, ultimately, not important. Your jobs are not important. Your individual lifestyle choices are not important.” —Willis Earl Beal “The only thing that is important is that you understand that we’re all interconnected. I am nothing. Nothing is everything.” Indeed. [1]

Willis Earl Beal performs (see below):

1. Nobody Knows
2. Burning Bridges

Beal’s artistry encourages the lumpenproletariat, the working classes, all, to take confidence, at the individual level, in oneself and one’s internal moral compass, despite the undisciplined or unorganised herd mentality of human social relations, which can be so overpowering upon our decision-making processes and often lead us to perpetuate suffering.

Beal’s work encourages us to look to oneself for guidance through life’s painful and difficult challenges. After all, it is one’s own decision, for example, whether or not to attend a particular church, mosque, temple, or synagogue. So, even at that level of human experience, free will becomes inescapable. This emphasis upon appreciating the significance of one’s own decision-making processes is consistent with the sacred, living, Buddhist teachings:

“Be a lamp to yourself. Be your own confidence. Hold to the truth within yourself, as to the only truth.” [3]

[1] This is one of life’s truths, which a good friend of mine (to this day), an elder, and a former high school teacher, affirmed when we spoke once when I was still a wee lad. For all the mistakes and miseducation of my youth, on one thing I was certain, on the interconnectedness of everything. This interconnectedness makes us one, like the blanket in the philosophical film I [Heart] Huckabees.

[2] Published by Willis Earl Beal at YouTube on October 25, 2013.

[3] From the teachings of the Buddha, quoted in, Stephen Mitchell, Editor, The Enlightened Mind: An Anthology of Sacred Prose, New York: Harper Perennial, 1991)